[flamwenco]

Having tried both Craft and Notion, I think your comparison is absolutely leaving out a number of factors in favor of the web-first solution.

Granted, maybe I have my own biases towards native applications, but to not list the performance and native system integrations as benefits of desktop over web seems criminal to me.

>- You code once, it works everywhere. I realize this may be a controversial opinion, but this was a stupid dream when I was a kid, and it's still a stupid dream now. Write once, run everywhere means you write a piece of software that sucks everywhere.

>- There is nothing to install, no updates to download. Ah yes, because everyone loves change. Especially unforecasted change right under their feet, with no way to revert to a previous version. No downsides here!

>But... Electron can provide all of that! So, it's mighty tempting to start with a web app and then pepper in some desktop functionality later by wrapping your web app using Electron. It certainly is tempting, but the easy way out is seldom the right one.

It's a very common thing that I see Electron apps overriding or not implementing native behaviors. Right click menus, menu bar items, common global shortcuts, none of that can be taken for granted in an Electron app, but mostly comes "for free" in a native app. You can certainly get some of this in a web/Electron app by using native forms and fields and not writing custom CSS/JS monstrosities for everything, but that so rarely seems to be the case these days. Why is Teams so special the right-click menu shouldn't act like the right click menu in Explorer, or Firefox? Why does slack use a native right click menu for messages, and not one when I right click on a channel in the sidebar?

>Some of it is intangible like "feels more solid". Some of these "intangible" benefits are certainly hard to quantify, but it can absolutely be a death by 1000 cuts type thing if behavior you're used to in literally every other application suddenly no longer works in an Electron app. For example, I have a global keyboard shortcut on my mac to Enter/Exit Full Screen mode. It doesn't work in Notion. Why? Because Notion (and other Electron apps like Slack) call the menu option something different. And yet... If I assign a keyboard shortcut to that different action, it works in Slack, but Notion just silently eats the input like nothing happened. Small tiny things like this are table stakes for applications feeling good, and when one application doesn't work like the rest of your system, it feels bad. This is absolutely exacerbated when you have a website as a desktop app because it's trying to trick you into thinking it's a real application.

Why do users no longer seem to care about desktop applications? It's because most of the people making them stopped giving a shit long before users did, and users are just rolling with the punches. No one is happy that everything is slower now though. Non-technical users may just not know how to explain why they're frustrated with everything.